Authenticity and Intention

A weeks ago I challenged myself to create a piece of slow cloth quickly.  Do you see the obvious problem with that?  Quick slow cloth is like army intelligence–oxymoronic.  And so it sat and sat and finally, gradually the pieces auditioning for inclusion were removed.  Stripped down to the bare essential underlying matrix.  This is where it was going but everything felt forced and contrived.  Looking at it now with the advantage of several weeks distancing, I see a bit where it was going.  Could have gone.

But it didn’t happen.  Because the part of my self that pays attention to intention was flashing red warning signs.  There is no picture of the stripped down cloth.  The little “cuties” are in the bucket of scrap cloth.  Why then, this morning, was I called to just revisit the scene?  I don’t know, really, but what happened was not planned and emerged effortlessly, spontaneously and almost in a “meant to be” progression.  This is the beginning.  This might also be where it stops.  But as I was contemplating the pieces I was struck by how this process parallels life.  All the pieces we accumulate.  Hopefully discarding what doesn’t work.  Then regrouping and reassembling.  Paying attention to commonalities.  The intersection of lines.  Lines representing lives.  Events.  One leading into another.  Moving between each element.  Joining paper and cloth.  Both so ephemeral.  So transient.  So destined to only last so long.  But the length of time doesn’t matter, does it?  It is only the authenticity behind intention that prevails.  The doing what feels true.  The listening to that voice which may become faint at times–but will not be silenced.